


eight thousand one hundred eighty six

by ThatAloneOne



Category: Star Trek, Star Trek: Discovery
Genre: Blanket Permission, F/F, Soulmates, which they discovery while Michael is in prison! GOOD TIMES, written on the skin soulmate au
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-12
Updated: 2018-03-12
Packaged: 2019-03-30 04:34:06
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,232
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13942692
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/ThatAloneOne/pseuds/ThatAloneOne
Summary: The Federation was always the cruellest when it tried to be kind.The marker stared Michael down. It was plain, grey, and double ended: a thick felt tip on one end, a fine pen on the other. It was shiny the way most replicated objects were, not quite metal and not quite plastic.Along with basic foods and items from each of the Federation cultures, each replicator contained a pattern for soulmate facilitation devices. Even prison replicators had them. The Federation weren’t monsters, after all. Not even to Michael, who was one.





	eight thousand one hundred eighty six

**Author's Note:**

  * For [pretentiousashell](https://archiveofourown.org/users/pretentiousashell/gifts).



> michaelburnhamfanclub / pretentiousashell said to me a little past midnight "THAT SOUNDS LIKE A GREAT IDEA DO IT" which was a _terrible idea_ but then this happened so I suppose it's all okay.

The Federation was always the cruellest when it tried to be kind.

The marker stared Michael down. It was plain, grey, and double ended: a thick felt tip on one end, a fine pen on the other. It was shiny the way most replicated objects were, not quite metal and not quite plastic.

Along with basic foods and items from each of the Federation cultures, each replicator contained a pattern for soulmate facilitation devices. Even prison replicators had them. The Federation weren’t monsters, after all. Not even to Michael, who was one.

Michael was familiar with the soulmate pens. Not because she used them on herself, but because she liked the way they scraped against paper, the way lines blurred and faded when they were used on surfaces other than skin. She wasn’t an artist, not really, but she liked to pretend at it. Xenoanthropology notes were much more effective when they included diagrams of the items discussed.

Vulcans had much more efficient mechanism for finding their Intendeds. They could hear echoes of each others thoughts, echoes that turned to voices when a bonding was successful. They didn’t have to be alone in their own minds. Certainly that would be illogical to a species with such strong, albeit repressed, social bonds. 

Cross-species soulmates were always complicated. Sarek and Amanda hadn’t been particularly, but Michael knew Amanda had struggled with that difference as a child. She had the faint telepathy of the Vulcan soulmate bond, not the written messaging system the standard human possessed.

Michael couldn't remember if she’d ever written a message to her soulmate. Perhaps she had as a small child, with her first set of parents. Regardless, she’d never received one. So it didn’t really matter.

Michael was glad for the pen, though she wished she had some paper as well. Anything, really, to serve her in this task. It would be beneath even her dignity, even now, to write on the walls. And it wasn’t like there was anything else to write on. 

Michael picked up the pen, and turned her arm over to stare at the slightly paler skin on her wrist.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Tilly’s arm was itching something awful by the time she got off shift. It had started up sometime after lunch, or whatever lunch-adjacent time her Gamma shift gave her.

There wasn’t _supposed_ to be anything Tilly was allergic to in her work area, but she was more than used to that being taken as more of a guideline. It was only that Lieutenant Stamets was so nice when he wasn’t being all grumpy? Was she supposed to write up her superiors every time they violated her accommodations? Tilly didn’t want to be writing reports every day. Was she supposed to submit reports every single time something went wrong? That would be a lot of reports.

When she managed to wrestle off her uniform sleeve, back in her empty quarters, it took a minute for her tired brain to catch up. There was no rash, no hives, no immune system trying to eat its way through her skin.

It was words. Or close enough.

Tilly was hyper aware of the buzz in the deck under her feet as the Discovery bustled along at warp, her breathing harsh in her ears. 

_8186_ was written in tiny numbers, just below her palm, in the instantly recognizable silver of a soulmate pen. Beneath that, spiralling around her wrist, was dots. Hundreds of them, at least, barely pinpricks. As she watched, more dots appeared, methodical, filling in the space on her forearm.

Tilly replicated a pen of her own. Carefully, neatly, on her opposite wrist so she wouldn’t trace over the dots, she wrote. **_Hi!_ **

After a moment, when her cheeks had gone the same red as the suns in the binary system they’d passed the day before, she scribbled more things under that. **_Are you okay? What do the dots mean?_ **

The dots stopped. There was a long, agonizing moment of nothingness. Tilly scrubbed at her arm where the dots lay, the itch fading now that she’d noticed that her soulmate had finally contacted her. It was like a dream come true, only Tilly had maybe dreamt that her soulmate would be a little less bewildering.

The letters of her soulmate’s writing were tiny like the letters, inscribed into Tilly’s am with care. _I’m trying to get a sense of scale._

**_Okay_** , Tilly wrote. After a moment of thought, she went back up and underlined the **_are you okay?_ ** part of her earlier message. In case her soulmate hadn’t noticed.

If Tilly could have one thing from her soulmate, she would want her soulmate to _notice_ things about her the way nobody else had.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Michael stared at the pen in her hand. She’d dotted down the first two thousand eight hundred sixty four people lost from the Battle at the Binary Stars and its repercussions, but suddenly with a soulmate on the other end it seemed foolish. She knew what kind of number eight thousand one hundred and eighty six was. Any child would know.

She had just wished that it would be different, somehow, illustrated. Smaller. But that was illogical. The consequences of her actions wouldn't change merely because she wished them to.

Michael smoothed her thumb across a pattern of dots. She was now realizing she had no idea how to erase the things she’d written on herself. She knew there was a specific, painless method built into the pen but she had never been in the place to use it for its intended purpose before.

Michael hesitated. The walls of her cell seemed to close in on her, sterile and clean and utterly impersonal. Nothing like her quarters on the _Shenzhou_ , decorated with her favourite artifacts and artists. There was no desert Vulcan hanging on her wall here, no way for anyone to tell who was at a look.

No, that wasn’t true. Here, they could see what mattered. Anyone who could look upon Michael in her cell right now could see that she was a mutineer. A criminal. A betrayer.

But her soulmate couldn't see her. All they had was silver pen against their wrist, a thousand or a fraction of a lightyear away.

_How do you erase what you’ve written? It seems best to clear space on the arm that’s easier to write on._

 

 

* * *

 

 

After a quick tutorial on soulmate pens, Tilly and her soulmate talked for hours. She were concise, whoever she was. To the point. Getting descriptions and ‘unnecessary’ words of her was like dredging water from an ancient well. It was cute.

As the night wore on, the stars blurring by outside Tilly’s porthole, she learned more and more about her soulmate. Tilly’s soulmate had been orphaned once, and her new family was loving but… difficult. She’d simply forgotten to pursue soulmate writing when nothing had appeared in her youth.

The first seeming spark of emotion Tilly got from her soulmate was when she explained why she hadn’t written. 

**_My mother thought soulmates were…_ **

Tilly scrubbed that out, running the centre of her soulmate pen over the words and watching them sparkle away. **_She said relying on some outside force like that would make me weak._ **

Tilly’s mother had thought Tilly was weak all on her own. Not for the first time, Tilly wished she’d never listened to her mother. If she was so awful to begin with, what would the harm be in defying her mother’s instructions? If only it had been that easy.

_Soulmates are a vital part of many cultures, and an important aspect of many others_ , Tilly’s soulmate scrawled back, indignant. This time, the letters tilted and swayed, set spinning by emotion. _To disregard something like this just for an outdated belief is irresponsible. I’m sorry._

**_I’m sorry you’re not okay_** , Tilly wrote back. And then cursed, the sound startling in her empty quarters. The bed she was allergic to stared at her from across the room, accusing. Maybe a roommate would have talked her out of saying dumb things to a soulmate she had just met. Universe-ordained compatibility or not, that was a dumb thing to say.

The silence — or well, blankness — stretched long enough that Tilly hauled herself up from her bed, muscles protesting, and finished prying herself out of her uniform. It was late enough that her eyes felt dry, her hair painful in its twist up against her head.

Tilly curled under her blankets in bed after a quick sonic shower, her arm stretched out in front of her. Sleep crept up on her, soft and cloying. But before it took, Tilly watched as the number at her wrist and all the other things her soulmate had written erase themselves. They disappeared line by line in slow, methodical strokes.

And then, where the number had been, her soulmate wrote, _Thank you_.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Writing to her soulmate became part of a daily routine. She woke-

practised Suus Mahna, ate a bland breakfast-

went for a run, drank a green breakfast-

and wrote out a good morning message.

Some days, she wished she could write to her mother. There were so many things she would say- 

_how right you were-_

_how wrong you were -_

but maybe it was better if the thoughts stayed just with her. With her, and her soulmate.

She was really starting to like her soulmate. It was someone to talk to during those long, crushing hours-

waiting alone in a cell, no other way out-

with the whole ship bustling around her but everyone   
else more invested in each other than in her.

She didn’t feel so insecure anymore, even if her soulmate took ages to get back to her. It was easier to understand that people had lives when the person on the other end of her skin had one too.

It was a special kind of wonderful, she thought, to always have someone around.

 

 

* * *

 

 

**_I finally got a roommate!_ **

_Me too._

**_What’s yours like?_ **  

_Nice but overenthusiastic. Yours?_

**_I’m jealous! Mine hasn’t said more than five words and most of them boiled down to ‘I'm a criminal’. It’s hard to write and hide under the covers at the same time._ **

_You do realize I’m a criminal?_

**_That’s different! And you couldn’t possibly have done something that bad anyway._ **

_You never know._

**_I know you!_ **

_You should be nice to her. Or not mean, at least. It’s easy to be lonely when people don’t think of you as a proper person._  

**_I know she’s a person. Of course I do!_ **

_Does she know you do?_

 

 

* * *

 

 

There was a rustle, then a thump. Michael focused on her breathing, the tang of shipboard air on her tongue. It tasted earthier than the sterile air in prison. Nothing like Vulcan, but different enough from her cell to be comforting. She didn’t want to hear whatever Tilly had to say now. What was worse? That stricken, sudden silence? Or whatever awful words she was surely about to start spouting?

People were awful, Michael had learned. Not just Vulcans. Not even just humans. Everyone. But humans had a special affinity for it, most days.

Michael just wanted to have something sweet in her life. Something uncomplicated. Her soulmate, wherever she was. Someone to talk to, more than silver writing against her skin, erased in a second and gone forever. 

“Hey,” Tilly whispered. Michael breathed in, out, and heard Tilly do the same, like she too needed steadying. And then- “I’m sorry.”

Michael’s eyes snapped open. The ceiling in her new quarters was made of real metal, not the replicated substance of her cell. She noted that difference, tucked it away deep inside herself. A sight she might never see again. “For?”

“A bad first impression.” Tilly sounded guilty. Emotion. Michael still wasn’t quite comfortable with that. “I shouldn’t have blanked you out like that.” 

Michael turned her head. In the faint starlight through the porthole, Tilly’s hair was a red halo around her soft face. “Oh,” Michael said. Then, “Thank you.”

Tilly laughed and stuck her hand out from beneath her covers. Faint silver glittered on her wrist, unreadable at this distance and this light. She couldn’t possibly have thought that she’d been able to shake hands with Michael from across the room, but she seemed to enjoy playing at it. “I’m Sylvia Tilly. What’s your name?”

Michael had read about this somewhere, in one of Amanda’s books. A fresh start, a veneer over the first in hopes that it would make the ending better. What a strange, human thing to do.

“Michael Burnham,” she whispered back, and for once she didn’t fear that her name would send someone recoiling. “Nice to meet you, Tilly.”

The other girl laughed and ducked her head into her pillow, the words muffled. “Don’t mention it.”

In the silent half-dark, Michael studied Tilly. Now that she wasn’t trying to avoid Michael, the kindness was evident in the lines of her face. She looked like the kind of person Michael could come to like, in some other life and time.

Tilly sighed again, her breath ruffling a lock of hair. Michael smiled, almost without meaning to. “Good night, Michael.”

 Michael let her hand slip out from beneath her blankets for a split second, returning Tilly’s imaginary handshake. She closed her eyes. “Good night, Tilly.”

Maybe it would be. A peaceful, good night.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find me at writerproblem193.tumblr.com!


End file.
